Online or Off Target?

A growing number of focus groups have migrated from the real to
the virtual world over the past two years. Market researchers say
the groups are cheaper to conduct online, results can be tallied
quickly, and developing technologies, like simultaneous language
translation, make them more attractive. But, they are quick to add,
online media will never replace face-to-face focus groups, because
the two are different animals.

Reviewing Web sites is a natural subject for online focus groups
and, not surprisingly, this is the service for which these groups
are used most. John Grafton, a market researcher at Atlanta-based
Turner Broadcasting Systems, used a virtual focus group to find out
if the reason one of TBS's Web sites wasn't getting as many hits as
expected was that the graphics-heavy site took too long to
download. "We used the group as a kind of litmus test to verify
what we'd suspected," says Grafton, who adds that conducting the
group online was a quick and easy way to get the information he
wanted.

Even researchers who prefer traditional methods agree that
online groups are extremely effective in bringing together people
from different parts of the country, especially those in higher
income brackets who cannot spare the time to travel to the site of
a conventional group. "If they are geographically dispersed, you'll
never get your respondents face-to-face without great expense, so
this is the next best way," says Robert Ferguson, vice president
and research director of qualitative services at BAIGlobal, a
research company in Tarrytown, New York. One group, convened to
discuss the airline industry by NFO Interactive, a Greenwich,
Connecticut-based research company, was comprised of individuals
with mean incomes of $150,000 a year. "You just can't get these
kinds of people to come into your office," says Charles Hamlin,
NFO's president, "but we can get them online."

Using virtual groups does have its downside. Since only
one-third of American adults are online, the sample won't be
representative of the general population, says Dan Coates, director
of Internet research at Burke. But because this online segment is
more technologically savvy than the average consumer, they are a
particularly good demographic for researching high-tech products,
says Spain.

Another negative, says Coates, is that the "no-show" rate is
roughly twice as high for online respondents. "It seems that the
easier and more convenient involvement is, the less of a personal
investment is made and the more likely respondents are to feel that
they can simply skip the group." As a result, Coates recruits more
than twice as many people for an online group.

The most significant drawback, however, is that online groups
effectively blindfold and earplug the moderator-none of the
participants' facial expressions, body language, and nuances of
speech are discernible. Though the software Coates uses allows him
to identify each respondent by name, track the exact time of
response, and even "whisper" to a particular respondent when he
doesn't want the rest of the group to listen in, he admits that
there's only so much he can glean from words on a screen. Ferguson
agrees: "You lose the ability to look at the respondent
face-to-face, to read their body language." Coates points out that
"emoticons" have been developed to fill this gap, such as typing
"LOL" when the respondent is "laughing out loud," but admits that
at best they are relatively crude indicators that represent three
or four simple emotions. And Spain doesn't think that many
respondents use them correctly, anyway. "We haven't figured out how
to get a lot of the real emotional stuff online," admits
Raffel.

Burke conducts only about 10 percent of its focus groups online
now. But given the cheap price tag, speed, and new technologies
that will facilitate Web-based communication, Raffel believes the
number of virtual focus groups will keep increasing, but will never
entirely replace their real world counterparts.

www.nolo.com This "self-help law center" is maintained by Nolo
Press, a publishing company founded by two legal aid lawyers who
began writing law books for non-lawyers in 1971. The site points
browsers towards the press' 120-plus titles, but there are also
meat-and-potatoes articles on such legal matters as small business
operations, tax law, and bankruptcy, and access to the cogent and
comprehensive Nolo's Legal Encyclopedia.

jobsmart.org/tools/salary/index.htm Job Smart is a career
database for California job seekers, but its information on
salaries will be useful for anyone researching earnings by field.
With links to more than 200 surveys, as well as magazines,
newspapers, trade journals, recruiters, and employment agencies,
the site provides easy access to precise salary information for 40
different industries.

www.nua.net/surveys If you're looking for current information on
the demographics of Internet use, Nua Internet Surveys is an online
archive of articles on the Internet's impact on everything from
banking to entertainment to senior citizens. The articles are
generally brief, and a few are just corporate news releases, but if
you use the site with a little discretion, it's a good place to get
what you want fast.

www.plannersweb.com/welcome.html The Planners Web is a service
of the Planning Commissioners Journal and features articles and
information on such development issues as roadway corridors,
zoning, and suburban sprawl. The site is admittedly "green" in
orientation, but it provides links to a wealth of information on
planning and development, and their impact on communities and the
environment. And without being dry.